MY left foot is in good shape, planted firmly in a crevice between two rocks and an empty Coke bottle, but my right foot is having terrible trouble. Everywhere it lands on this nearly vertical plain of pale golden rock, a stone wobbles underneath,...

"THE most beautiful view I ever saw in the world," wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in 1842 of Clew Bay. It was his first visit to this beguiling sweep of water speckled with 365 oddly shaped islands amid the bleak mountains and boglands of County...